Much Ado About Something: Scholar Finds New Poem By The Bard

November 24, 1985|By New York Times

OXFORD, ENGLAND — A 32-year-old American from Topeka, Kan., has discovered a previously unknown nine-stanza love lyric that is attributed in the manuscript copy to William Shakespeare. It appears to be the first addition to the Shakespeare canon since the 17th century.

The untitled poem, which is unusual for its intricate scheme of internal rhymes in short, six-syllable lines, had been sitting in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in a bound folio collection of poems that the library has had in its archives for 230 years. The volume, transcribed in a calligraphic style formally known as upright English secretary hand, appears to date from the 1630s.

In printed catalogs of the Bodleian's vast manuscript collection, it was noted in 1895 and again in 1969 that the volume contained a poem attributed to Shakespeare.

Until Friday afternoon at about 3 p.m., when the collection was placed in the library's vault, any scholar could have walked into the Bodleian and called it up for examination.

But, as far as anyone can tell, no one ever did this with an eye to examining the poem attributed to Shakespeare until Gary Taylor did it last week. Taylor has been working for 7 1/2 years as an editor of a new one-volume collection of Shakespeare's works that Oxford University Press is to publish next year. He was making a final check of manuscript sources as a matter of scholarly ''duty and thoroughness.''

The 1969 Bodleian catalog had listed the first lines of poems in manuscript form in the library, including a line (''Shall I die? Shall I fly'') that the young American did not recognize. It was a loose end that needed checking, so Taylor, who began work on a doctorate 10 years ago at Cambridge University but never completed it, left a call-up slip overnight at the Bodleian so the volume would be available for his examination the next day.

He did not allow himself, he said Saturday, to consider the possibility that he was about to make a major literary discovery.

The next morning, Nov. 15, he even did some office chores at the university press' Shakespeare department before heading to the Bodleian to peruse the manuscript.

The volume actually contained two poems attributed to Shakespeare. One was a brief epitaph already familiar to Shakespearean scholars.

The longer poem, a lustful reverie in the standard genre of Elizabethan love lyrics, was entirely unknown to Taylor.

After a close examination of the folio collection, a search of other manuscript sources in major libraries and close reading of the poem itself, he and Dr. Stanley Wells, a leading authority who heads the university press' Shakespeare department, plan to include the poem in the new edition they are editing.

Internal evidence in the poem -- the choice of words and images -- strongly indicates to them that Shakespeare must have written it between 1593 and 1595, the period in which the youthful playwright -- just turning 30 -- wrote A Midsummer's Night Dream, Love's Labor's Lost and Romeo and Juliet.

Taylor and Wells believe the burden of proof is now with anyone who wants to cast doubt on the attribution.